Reviews and News:
Did you listen to Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture yesterday? Or after the third redundancy in three minutes, did you decide that answering that work email about spoiled food in the office fridge was a better use of your time? Either way, you probably heard the background piano as Dylan imitated himself talking about Moby Dick, and you may have wondered who was playing. Answer: Alan Pasqua, who played for Dylan in the 70s. He talked to the New York Times about it: "I got a voice mail from Bob's business manager. I chuckled. 'Wow, maybe I'm going back on tour!' So I called back, and he said, 'Have you ever watched those old clips of Steve Allen interviewing people, when he plays the piano?' And I was like, yeah! And he said, 'Well, we need some of that kind of music.'"
* *
Adam Kirsch reviews Marjorie Perloff's new book on six post-imperial Austrian writers. Perfoff, herself a Viennese émigré, sees irony in the work of writers like Karl Kraus and Joseph Roth as a form of mourning for an empire and a way of life that had disappeared.
* *
Sony to release "Clean Version" of 24 movies.
* *
The latest money-making idea from the Harper Lee estate: A To Kill a Mockingbird graphic novel. "The graphic novel will be illustrated by Fred Fordham, the artist behind Philip Pullman's recent first venture into the form, The Adventures of John Blake: Mystery of the Ghost Ship. The London-born artist said: 'Adapting a story that means so much to so many – and finding the appropriate art style to give it life in a long-form visual medium – is a great honour and responsibility, and, mercifully, also a great pleasure.'"
* *
Paul Willis reviews the letters of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry: "Wendell and I argued about two things for forty years...Buddhism vs. Christianity, and wilderness vs. agriculture."
* *
Stuart Hall helped ruin English studies. His memoir shows that he thought mostly in "periphrastic boilerplate": "'Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.' After two or three goes at such stuff you get the gist. But since the gist has been put rather better by others, including Auden, Browning and Emerson, you can't help wondering whether the polysyllabic mash-up isn't just the usual academic camouflage for paucity of thought."
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Frances Spalding considers how religion shaped London and its architecture:
"London's streets are gridded with names that take us back into the past: to the passage of animals – Lamb's Conduit Street – for example, or, as with nearby Coram's Fields, to the site of the eighteenth-century Foundling Hospital, signalling a sudden leap forward in charitable giving through the inspired agency of the retired sailor, Captain Thomas Coram. But memory and the business of forgetting remain close partners. In Visualising a Sacred City, we are reminded that Bunhill Fields, where today's office workers eat sandwiches at John Bunyan's side, is a rare example of a Dissenters' burial ground. Most have been eradicated and George Fox, although buried in Quaker Ground at Roscoe Street, now lies beneath a Board School converted into expensive flats, a 'coffee palace', houses and shops.
"Whether we have religious faith or not, our horizons regarding the architecture of the holy will be reshaped and broadened by this book. The sacred spaces discussed here begin in Roman times when, as recent excavations have shown, London contained many images of gods. In the medieval period references to the Holy Land crept into the architectural fabric of London, chiefly thanks to the Knights Templars' fascination with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (where Christ's body is said to have been buried) and its Anastasis Rotunda, an association that squared the circle not only with perfection but also with the Resurrection."
* *
Photo: Thai Vi Temple Festival
* *
Poem: Christian Barter, "They Are Blowing the Leaves from the Grass at Princeton"
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.